Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 1023	3 May 2013

In Wake of Boston Bombing

Ominous Display of Police-State Powers

The bombing that killed three spectators at the Boston Marathon—an eight-year-old child, a young restaurant manager and a university student from China—and wounded more than 260 others was naturally viewed with abhorrence by people in the U.S. and internationally, with many contributing funds for surviving victims of this criminal act of indiscriminate terror. And just as naturally, this country’s capitalist rulers seized the opportunity to further their offensive against the rights of the population. Amid a tide of “national unity” patriotism and slogans proclaiming “Boston strong,” the government in essence declared that when the “terror” threat is invoked, police-state measures like the lockdown of Boston are the “new normal,” and people had better accept that. Portrayed as heroes in Boston were the same cops whose job is to maintain capitalist “order” through organized violence against workers and minorities.

From the first reports of the bombing, the capitalist media did their best to whip up a climate of racist hysteria. Based on no evidence, CNN falsely reported that a “dark-skinned male” had been arrested for the bombing. Every black man in America knows what that can mean. The New York Post reported that the prime suspect was a Saudi man, who turned out to be one of those injured in the blast. Then the Post fingered two innocent men, one of them a Moroccan, by plastering their photos on its front page.

Giving the anti-Muslim scare a more “respectable” gloss, the New York Times (April 20) quoted an “expert” who evoked the “divided loyalties” of Americans who turn to jihad. The question, he said, is “are you American first or are you Muslim first?” The not-so-subtle message is that Muslim Americans represent a potential fifth column, a disloyal and dangerous “enemy within.” To deal with such elements, the state has at its disposal a vastly increased arsenal of repressive powers put in place as part of the imperialists’ “war on terror.”

In a virtual state of martial law, the entire Boston metropolitan area was placed under lockdown for a full day. The Massachusetts governor’s order that all residents remain at home with their doors locked was unprecedented for a major American city. Residents watched as hundreds of National Guardsmen in full battle gear and SWAT teams backed up by military helicopters and armored personnel carriers sealed off streets and carried out house-to-house searches. All to track down the wounded, unarmed, 19-year-old suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who could not show his face in public after the massive media exposure.

A resident of Watertown, where the search was centered, told reporters: “Now I know what it must be like to be in a war zone like Iraq or Afghanistan.” If this were Baghdad, the number of those killed and maimed at the marathon would be a small toll for a normal day. Toward the end of April, 215 people were killed over a five-day period in Iraq due to bombings and clashes between Sunnis and Shi’ites.

Once a cultural center of the Near East, Iraq was starved for over a decade by United Nations sanctions that led to the deaths of some 1.5 million people. Those sanctions pulverized Iraq in the lead-up to the U.S. imperialist war and occupation, which completed the country’s destruction. Launched in the name of fighting terror and bringing democracy to Iraq, the war has left behind a country torn and bloodied by intercommunal killings and terror bombings. The U.S. bourgeoisie hypocritically celebrates the resilience and dignity of Bostonians—as if the capitalists gave a damn about the well-being of the working people. But the resilience and dignity of Iraqis trying to go about their lives, when every trip to school, work or the market can be a death sentence, goes unnoticed in this country’s capitalist media.

In self-serving reaction to the Boston bombing, the American rulers and their mouthpieces in the press ask: Why do “they” hate us? From Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond, the U.S. military has unleashed staggering levels of deadly terror in the name of the “war on terror.” In what is an almost routine event, special forces in eastern Afghanistan searching for an alleged Taliban militant blew up his home on April 6, killing 18 people, including at least ten children. In February, a NATO airstrike in the same area killed ten civilians, including five women and four children. Several thousand people have been massacred in missile strikes from unmanned U.S. drones in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Whether or not Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston bombers, were motivated by opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as has been reported, there is no doubt that the cycle of U.S. military mayhem is helping to generate an endless stream of people who hate America, and, in some cases, Americans.

On an immensely greater scale than the Boston bombing, the perpetrators of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center also took aim at everyday people—native-born and immigrant, black and white, well-heeled and not. Their reactionary mind-set equated the U.S. populace with its capitalist rulers. This is the same equation made by the U.S. rulers themselves in promoting the “unity” of all Americans while grinding the working class, black people and the poor into the ground and taking an ax to basic democratic rights.

With their barrage of announcements that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would be questioned without being read his Miranda warning, police and government spokesmen tried to hammer people into meekly accepting that the right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present during interrogation can be suspended for “emergencies.” During the Ronald Reagan presidency, the Supreme Court cut back Miranda protections when police cite “public safety” concerns. This “exception” was invoked in interrogating the suspects in the Christmas 2009 “underwear bomber” incident and the 2010 attempted bombing in Times Square. In 2010, the Obama administration moved to sweep away Miranda rights altogether in purported terrorism cases. A Justice Department memorandum instructed federal agents to dispense with Miranda simply if they feel it necessary, even if there is not “any immediate threat.”

When Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham demanded that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be declared an “enemy combatant,” and therefore subject to indefinite detention without any legal rights, Obama sanctimoniously announced that this would not be necessary, as the civilian courts would suffice. With Tsarnaev’s conviction on any charge all but a certainty, Obama thus got to engage in cheap posturing as standing above the machinations of the Bush White House, which so stained the “democratic” facade of American imperialism. This brought no solace to desperate Guantánamo inmates who continue their hunger strike, demanding an end to their torturous indefinite detention. As for the charge that Tsarnaev used a “weapon of mass destruction,” this comes from the Commander-in-Chief of the only country to have ever used atomic weapons, incinerating 200,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

In a further threat to civil liberties, the Boston bombing has triggered widespread calls from bourgeois politicians and newspaper editorialists for increased deployment of surveillance cameras. In Chicago, cops already have access to an estimated 15,000 surveillance cameras, with the city aiming to install a camera “on every corner.” In New York, Mayor Bloomberg announced on April 25 that the city is developing a computer system that will analyze data captured by some 6,000 cameras that have already been installed. He warned NYC residents: “You’re never going to know where all of our cameras are.” And both Republicans and Democrats have bills pending in Congress that would encourage the use of drones to spy on the U.S. population.

Although nothing was known of the Tsarnaev brothers’ motives—or whether they even had any—they were immediately declared “terrorists.” Basically, “terrorism” is whatever the capitalist rulers and their security forces declare it to be, as when they went after the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and early ’70s. A century ago, unions were outlawed as “criminal conspiracies.” Would the West Virginia miners on strike in 1977-78, who defended their picket lines arms in hand, be designated today as “terrorists”? One way that Obama has broadened the sweep of the “war on terror” initiated under Bush has been to victimize leftist political activists (see “Defend the NATO 3!” page 5).

Well aware that galloping inequality—greatly deepened by the global economic crisis—is increasing social tensions that sow the seeds of class struggle, the rulers are eager to use the panoply of “anti-terror” measures to strengthen the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state against the working class and the oppressed. This may not be evident today in the absence of any massive social or class struggle and with a sellout labor “leadership” that is beholden to the capitalist profit system and loyally backs the interests of U.S. imperialism. But what must be understood nevertheless is that the government’s drive to roll back civil liberties and regiment the population is ultimately directed against the ability of working people to struggle in their own interests against the capitalist rulers.

The working class cannot advance its struggle against exploitation without also defending democratic rights and opposing every instance of imperialist barbarism carried out by its own ruling class. Our task is to forge a revolutionary workers party grounded in the Marxist understanding that the decaying capitalist system must be overthrown through socialist revolution.